Westchester Ranks Among Nation's 10 Most Expensive Places To Raise Family

After paying basic bills, the average family of four in Westchester doesn't have much left over for the fun stuff, like riding the Dragon Coaster at Playland in Rye, according to data released by marketwatch.com.
Photo Credit: Rye Playland/Facebook

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Westchester County is nearly at the top of the list of the 10 most expensive places in the country for a two-parent family to raise two children, according to a recent survey by marketwatch.com.

It came in at No. 3. Its neighbor to the south, New York City, was just one notch lower, at No. 4.

The top two places?: Washington, D.C., and Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island.

Marketwatch.com is a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, which is owned by News Corp. It operates a financial information website with business news, stock market data, and analysis.

It found that in some places, parents need up to six figure paychecks just to get by.

This means they need to pull in from $50,000 to more than $100,000, marketwatch.com found, citing data from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.

In Westchester, the amount needed just to pay the bills – no savings – is $99,592 “on average.”

The average amount of taxes families pay in Westchester each year is $15,589, marketwatch.com found.

The same family of four, living in The Big Apple, forks out $98,722. At least there, they can take advantage of a break in transportation costs.

In the nation’s capital, that same family would need $106,493. Part of that is due to the high cost of child care, estimated at $31,158 a year, the highest in the country, marketwatch.com reported.

The study examined 618 metropolitan areas and made its calculations based on the cost of food, housing, health and child care, transportation, taxes, and other bare necessities such as school supplies.

In 500 of the areas surveyed, according to the EPI data, child care took the biggest bite out of the family budget. It averaged $12,500 a year.

The other places that made it into the Top 10 were, in descending order: Stamford/Norwalk, Conn.; Honolulu, Poughkeepsie/Newburgh/Middletown, Ithaca, San Francisco, and Danbury, Conn.